Word, Excel, Powerpoint and more for Free Download

Sorry but the answer is NO. You cannot legally download Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or the complete MS Office for free from www.mininova.org or any download sites for that matter. But if you want to get a free copy that does the same things and more, then you can get the alternative - Open Office 2.4.


Remember when you bought that new PC or inherited an old one? It only comes with MS Works or just the Wordpad, or nothing at all. What is a PC without an office suite? A gaming rig :) But we can always get a "copy" of MS Office from the office or a friend or someone in the mall that sells the whole suite on a CD for a small fraction of the actual price. Don't forget to ask about the CD key :)


Open Office is a free cross-platform office suite. It is an opensource program that is free to download, install on as many computers your like, use it for personal or commercial use, copy and distribute to anyone and you can even look at and edit the source code (if you know what you are doing). It has a version for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, so you can use the same program if you work on different platforms.

How Open Office 2.4 Holds Up?

Two features I like about OpenOffice are: 1) It has native save file as PDF and 2) it can open the newer MS Office 2007 formats. I don't know if the older MS Office versions can do the same right now(?)

There are minor differences and some minor trade-offs in using Open Office but its a very little price to pay to get a free and open source program.

Finding your Emails in Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a free email program that can be run on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It is a lean program but its functionality can be extended by installing "add-ons" which can make it as feature-filled than MS Outlook and even more. So you only need to add what features you need and not be stuck with built in features you don't want.

What I like about thunderbird is how easy it is to find your emails. There are several features that are worth mentioning but these are the two I like the most:

1. Quick search as you type. On the upper right corner of the window is a search field that searches your whole inbox as you type. The default is to search by subject or sender. If you wanted to search for an email and don't remember the sender or subject but remember a word in the contents then you can do a "search of entire message" and it searches while you type. Just click on the drop-down arrow inside the search field to choose what kind of search to perform.

2. Another feature that helps you organize and find emails is by "tagging". In addition to built in tags, you can now add your own tags. So, you can tag emails about a project, emails about your vacation plans, or emails from friends for easy retrieving.

I got to try thunberbird because Outlook crashes on me and then it has to rebuild its database which takes up time since I have thousands of emails. Thunderbird solved that problem for me and have used it ever since.